Nine Talmudic Readings Quotes

“Consciousness is the urgency of a destination leading to the other person and not an eternal return to self.”
― Emmanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings

“What is tempting here is the situation in which the ego remains independent but where this independence does not exclude it from what must consume it, either to exalt it or to destroy it. What is tempting is to be simultaneously outside everything and participating in everything.”
― Emmanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings

“The reference to a biblical verse does not aim at appealing to authority—as some thinkers drawn to rapid conclusions might imagine. Rather, the aim is to refer to a context which allows the level of the discussion to be raised and to make one notice the true import of the data from which the discussion derives its meaning. The transfer of an idea to another climate—which is its original climate—wrests new possibilities from it. Ideas do not become fixed by a process of conceptualization which would extinguish many of the sparks dancing beneath the gaze riveted upon the Real. I have already had occasion here to speak of another process which consists in respecting these possibilities and which I have called the paradigmatic method. Ideas are never separated from the example which both suggests and delimits them.”
― Emmanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings

“The original function of speech consists not in designating an object in order to communicate with the other in a game with no consequences but in assuming toward someone a responsibility on behalf of someone else. To speak is to engage the interests of men. Responsibility would be the essence of language.”
― Emmanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings